Prolepsis
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Prolepsis (from the Greek prolambanein, to anticipate) can be:
- A figure of speech in which a future event is referred to in anticipation. For example, a character who is about to die might be described as "the dead man", before he is actually dead. The same device can be used in non-verbal media such as film, where it is also called flashforward. [Source: Britannica]
- The anticipation of an objection. For example, a speaker might say "'Ah', you say, 'but that is impossible!'" Here the speaker is anticipating the objection 'Ah, but that is impossible!' from his audience - and is probably about to refute that objection before it arises. This form is more accurately called procatalepsis. [1] (http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Figures/P/prolepsis.htm)
- A grammatical construction that consists of placing an element in a syntactic unit before that to which it would logically correspond. Example: "That noise, I just heard it again.", where that noise grammatically belongs in place of it.
- A philosophical concept used in ancient epistemology (in particular by Epicurus and the Stoa) to indicate a so-called "preconception", i.e. a pre-theoretical notion which can lead to true knowledge of the world.
See also
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